Written by: Rev Wendy Snook

This webpage contains links to thirty-eight sermons written by twenty-one living Australian women in the 1990's, from six denominations, and four states of Australia. They include lay and ordained women, (ministers, pastors, deacons and a sister), professional theologians and local preachers. They include single, married, lesbian and widowed women, living in cities, regional towns and rural areas. Denominationally they are Uniting Church, Anglican, Pentecostal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, and United Methodist, and come from Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

In order to study homiletics from the perspective of gender, the sermons were collected and studied by Rev. Wendy Snook, as the basis for her Masters of Theology (Honours) degree, '"God speaks to Australia through Women": Homiletics and Gender in the preaching of Australian Women in the '90's.' Dissertation, (M. Theol. Hons.), Murdoch University, 2000. The thesis focuses on the language and content of the preaching of Australian women in the '90's, as a descriptive task, and to offer a prophetic critique of current practice of Australian women's preaching in the light of the issue of gender, to encourage a more life-giving future. (See Abstract.) They were received as manuscripts, and /or tapes, which were transcribed.

Only minor corrections like spelling and punctuation have been made to the sermons for easier reading. Otherwise the sermons are as spoken and written by the authors. For more contextual details, see the link to Table 1 from Appendix B of the thesis. Again for easier reading, this version of the collection does not contain the line numbering used for the thesis' analysis. A hard copy of the collection including line numbers is in the Murdoch University library.

This collection is published as a resource for people interested in Homiletics in Australia, and the preaching of women. All the women are happy to have their sermons published here, but would ask that their work be acknowledged if it is used for preaching. The copyright remains with them, and the sermons may not be reproduced for commercial purposes without permission. For further information, please email Rev Wendy Snook, or for the thesis, Murdoch University library.